...an award-nominated Irish blog on Irish history and Irish politics-from today and yesterday:all 32 Counties !Updated a number of times each week . (Mirror site here)

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

THE IRA : the new IRA is younger , more radical and has seen little of life other than violence.......By Ed Moloney. From 'Magill' magazine, September 1980.

Journalist Ed Moloney speaks to a leading member of the Provisional IRA who has been authorised to speak on behalf of the IRA Army Council :

Ed Moloney : " The PIRA and its campaign of violence have been going on for nearly 10 years now . The British are still in the North despite that. Why go on? "

IRA : " First of all the IRA is not ten years old , it's over 60 years old . As for why we continue the campaign , nothing has changed in the Occupied Six Counties but there is a lot of evidence that things can be changed . We have been wearing down successive British administrations , we have worn down their will . There are indications now of changes taking place within the British political scene - the 'Young Liberals', for example, have come out in support of a policy of disengagement from Ireland and there are at present discussions going on within the National Executive of the Labour Party .

There is also evidence that a lot of British soldiers are fed up with what's going on in the North and Document 37 shows that the present commander of British land forces in the North of Ireland , Brigadier-General James Glover, knows that we are not a spent force and that we will continue . And he also admitted the cause of the trouble was the presence of British forces....... "

The book contains detailed and well-documented evidence on events about which the general public were successfully hoodwinked by British Army propagandists and an eagerly collaborationist establishment media . I myself clearly recall how, on the day the IRA successfully executed five agents of the British Army's 'Military Reconnaissance Force' in the 'Four Square Laundry' van in Twinbrook , and in a 'massage parlour' on the Antrim Road , an inhabitant of Twinbrook , prompted by a TV reporter , supplied the ritual remark for the TV screens , about "....an ordinary man (the MRF driver of the van!) just going about his daily work.."

Roger Faligot shows that among British reporters and editors there were always plenty willing to put out any story , however fantastic, as long as it served the British war effort in this country .

Eamonn McCann of the Dublin-based 'Sunday World' 'newspaper' states - " The media have been active participants in the war , not disinterested observers of it . History has proven that the artificial state of 'Northern Ireland' cannot be maintained except by force of arms . To support the existence of the State is therefore to accept the necessity for violence . No newspaper which supports the British troops in Ireland can afford to tell the truth."

(MORE LATER).

THE UNDAUNTED WOMEN IN ARMAGH.......

The full story of the republican prisoners in Armagh Jail has yet to be told. It has yet to be sung , and properly described , other than as an after-thought in public speeches - "...and of course the women in Armagh.." Republicans have a right to be proud of those women who, from the Divis Flats grandmother doing six months for what an Orange judge called "riotous behaviour" to the young IRA Volunteer inside for the second time and not yet 25-years-old , have managed, whether they numbered 12 or 120 , to maintain their resistance to the most vicious prison system in Europe. The words that follow , says writer Patricia Collins , were written to encourage more of those women to come forward and tell their story , and are based on conversations with several ex-prisoners , and on visits and letters from those women presently imprisoned. They were written in the hope of jogging the memory of all those women who wrongly think their contribution to Ireland's future peace is not worth mentioning. From 'IRIS' magazine , August 1984.

The recreation facilities are pitiful . Even a plan to build a gymnasium/workshop will be confined to use by male prisoners . The women have no cooking facilities either , although the transferred prisoners from Portlaoise do . Marion Coyle's enforced restriction on letters - she is allowed to receive only two each week - has frequently been abused by the prison authorities who have allowed her crank letters and anonymous letters while withholding letters from close friends .

For a long time Marion Coyle received verbal abuse from the Free State soldiers who patrol the prison's perimeter walls and who were able to look directly into her cell . However , that abuse did cease , for a while at least , after a complaint by independent Leinster House member Tony Gregory was voiced in that institution . On the ordeal of prison visiting , her mother outlines the difficulties involved.......